Residents of N.E. Alberta have been celebrating their neighborhood with a street fair for the last 17 years, and as the neighborhood has been evolving over the last two decades, so has the fair, becoming an annual microcosm of the ever-changing face of Northeast Portland.

Vendors lined either side of nearly 20 blocks of the street Saturday afternoon, as businesses on the other side of the sidewalk hummed casually with weekend traffic. Visitors came from the surrounding neighborhood, from other parts of the city, from suburbs and even other states.

That much was clear to Dingo Dizmal, a local clown who has been in town since 2004. "It's not the same Alberta that I showed up at," he said. "Now it's something I don't recognize at all."

He moved to the neighborhood in the mid 2000s when the rent got too high at his house off N. Mississippi. Back then Dingo was taking his clowning to local protests, wearing chain mail made of plastic milk jugs (to protect against rubber bullets), armed with a squirt gun filled with milk of magnesia (for the pepper spray).

"Anything we could protest, we would," he said.

But the area quickly changed. Protesters like Dingo started to see change they fought for. Police no longer cracked down on the counterculture, and protests largely ceased to exist.

"We seemed to have gotten all the things we wanted, and then that opens a new present – OK how do we deal with getting what we want?" Dingo said. "First of all we have to take the angry hat off and put on a happy hat, and then go from hard power to kinder, gentler, soft power."

The win felt nice, he said, but with it came a new population that was willing to spend top dollar to live in the quirky neighborhood now that it was safe. Dingo once again faced rising rent and once again had to move, making the way for the more upscale Alberta that exists today.

Jamie Hale/The Oregonian

That change – which goes by its oft-repeated technical term, gentrification – has been hotly debated around town, but at the Alberta Street Fair, held in a neighborhood at the center of the debate, the issue didn't come up at all.

That's not saying that it should. Gentrification is a topic that comes with a lot of anger and guilt, and few want to go there on a day that's supposed to be a fun.

"Some of it we're extremely sensitive to," said James Armstrong, board president of Alberta Main Street, which puts on the fair. "We definitely want this to be an atmosphere where everybody can get involved."

Armstrong moved to the neighborhood a couple years ago to establish Alberta Eye Care, right next door to the bustling Salt & Straw, with his wife Laura. With Alberta Main Street his goal is to continue to grow and promote the neighborhood economy.

"The point for us of Alberta Main Street is to help this business corridor grow," Armstrong said. "Anything we can do to create a good environment for that, we try to do."

The booming street fair, filled with tourists and locals browsing both booths and neighboring stores, is evidence that their initiative is working. But as opponents of the drastic change point out, it's important to remember who inconveniently gets left out of the picture.

That point is important for people like Taylor Richman. He grew up in East Portland, but now lives in Seattle, and comes back each year with his wife and two young kids. Most of Portland has been changing over the years, but the change at Alberta, he said, has been especially drastic.

"It wasn't a particularly nice street growing up," Richman said. So much so that his mother didn't allow him to ride his bike alone in the area.

The makeover looks nice, he said, but it should have been done more responsibly. "The good comes with the bad," Richman said. "If we need to change the demographic of the street, we need to think about that."

But at this point, with Alberta already changed so much, there's little anyone can do. Rents will rise and nice, successful businesses will replace crumbling buildings and vacant lots. Those with money will replace those without. The demographics will inherently shift.

It's not always a pleasant scenario, but it can be difficult to do much about gentrification, especially once it's already done. And although the change in Portland has inspired a lot of fierce debate, Dingo Dizmal said it's not worth getting too upset about – especially in the festive fair environment.

He and Olive have changed with the times too, performing on Saturday to a sizable crowd of kids and parents. As Portland gets softer, he's finding he can hang up the plastic chain mail and put on a friendlier face.

"You get a lot more flies with honey than vinegar," Dingo said. "And we're having a great time with it too."